Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Intimate partner violence IPV is a significant global public health problem.
Understanding risk factors is crucial for developing prevention programmes. Our objective was to measure both lifetime and past year prevalence of IPV and to determine factors associated with past year physical or sexual IPV experience. This population-based survey involved randomly selected women aged 18 to 49 years living in 40 localities within four districts of the Central Region of Ghana. Questionnaires were interviewer-administered from February to May Logistic regression modelling was used to determine factors associated with sexual or physical IPV, adjusting for age and survey design.
Past year experience of emotional and economic IPV were Male perpetrated IPV remains a significant public health issue in Ghana. Intimate partner violence IPV is an important global public health problem and contributes significant social and economic costs to societies [ 1 , 2 ]. While both males and females could be victims of IPV, evidence shows a disproportionate prevalence among women [ 3 ].
The immediate and later health consequences of IPV on victims include physical death and injury , mental depression, alcohol use problems , sexual and reproductive health risks HIV, sexually transmitted infections, unwanted pregnancy and abortion and unfavorable pregnancy outcomes , and impaired social functioning [ 1 , 3 , 5 ].
Identified risk factors for IPV include history of violence in childhood, low education, alcohol and drug use, stress, communication challenges between partners, unequal power in relationships, unemployment status of male partners, gender inequitable masculinities and harmful attitudes to gender relations that result in female disempowerment and marginalization [ 8 โ 14 ]. Combining the prevalence of IPV and non-partner sexual violence shows a higher burden in Africa at The situation in Ghana is not very different from that reported for the entire African region.
